Mariah Gruner

Materializing Gender, Stitching Selfhood: American Women’s Decorative Needlework, 1820-1920

My dissertation, “Stitching Selfhood, Materializing Gender: The Political Uses of American Women’s Decorative Needlework, 1820-1920,” has two main aims: to examine decorative needlework as a site of gender construction, performance, and contestation and to understand how this embroidery was deployed as an invocation of the past, while simultaneously enabling novel iterations of gendered behavior and reception. Analyzing the rise of architectural iconography on 1820’s schoolgirl samplers, abolitionist women’s use of needlework to enter the political sphere, and suffragists’ internal arguments about needlework as a political medium, I explore how American women used needlework both to signal their belonging to normative femininity and broaden its definition. I also highlight the fact that only some women could use these “domestic” labors to create space for themselves in political and cultural debates, often by aligning themselves with the projects of whiteness, national expansion, and market capitalism.

This project engages with the notion that decorative embroidery is neatly aligned with notions of normative femininity, domesticity, and sentimentality, a discourse stabilized, challenged, and leveraged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I examine women’s politicized engagements with this medium and process, underscoring the ways in which they used decorative needlework’s apparent normativity as a strategic tool. By exploring the malleability of decorative needlework in practice and in discourse, I show how the categories of gender, temporality, and domesticity were also contested, made, and remade in the physical process of craft. I ask what force resides in the history of a form, a medium, a material process. And I consider how American women used those histories to shape and frame their gender performances.